During recent decades, seismic shifts have animated historians' thinking, driven by the cumulative challenges of new gendered, global, and racial histories. How have these critical perspectives transformed the construction of historical knowledge and shaped the writing of the history of twentieth-century Europe? If we dethrone masculinity, dismantle Eurocentrism, and decenter the metropole, what will the new frameworks look like?

Friday, November 15
1014 Tisch Hall

9:00 am: Welcome

9:15-10:00 am: Keynote
Geoff Eley (University of Michigan): Generative Optimism: How Do We Write the Twentieth Century?

10:15 am-12:15 pm: Living in Modernity
Tracie Matysik (University of Texas at Austin): Biopolitics and the Nonhuman
Monica Black (University of Tennessee-Knoxville): Modernity and the Everyday
Comments: Scott Spector (University of Michigan)

2:00-4:00 pm: Modernity as a Finite Destination
Anne Berg (University of Pennsylvania): Extractivism: Garbage and Modern Violence
Roberta Pergher (Indiana University): The Wish for Citizenship: Belonging and Empowerment in a Low Dishonest Decade
Lewis Siegelbaum (Michigan State University): Modernity’s Hubris: Societies, States, and Accelerated Transformation
Comments: Dario Gaggio (University of Michigan)

4:00-6:00 pm: The Modernist Wish Roundtable
Kathleen Canning (Rice University)
Lucy Hartley (University of Michigan)
Deborah Field (University of Michigan)
Ismael Biyashev (University of Michigan)

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.